The GO platform provides a window into the world of emergency response across the Red Cross Red Crescent world, providing the latest data and situational information. Increasingly, it is also becoming a reference for useful tools as well as a repository for operational learning and trend and risk analysis.
We promote the use of these tools and the data made available through GO by inviting all our users to a briefing every 3 months, reminding them of existing, and introducing new, features. Read on for a summary, the slides and an edited recording from two sessions we held covering the second quarter of 2023.
Translating our network on GO
The IFRC is the world’s largest humanitarian network, made up of 191 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, present in nearly every country of the world. In order to ensure our incredibly diverse membership can access and input data on GO we have been working to enable translation between the four official IFRC languages, i.e. Arabic, English, French and Spanish.
Since 2021, you have been easily able to navigate between the different language versions of GO by using the drop-down button at the top of every page. We are now happy to announce the availability of automatic translation of user content as well. For instance, if a user is submitting a field report to GO, they can now do so in their preferred official language, confident of this being available to read by the network in the other three languages.
There are a couple of limitations — a) content submitted in one language can only be translated in that particular language — a technical limitation to avoid discrepancies between branches of translated text, and b) we are still not able to directly translate dashboards created in, for example, PowerBI or Tabeau embedded on the site.
GO faster
The GO platform has been built through the generous financial and technical contributions of our membership. Pieced together over the past five years by developer teams meeting varying requirements and adapting to emerging technologies, GO is unfortunately inconsistent in style and performance. If you were being harsh, there is something in the description of GO as a tower built with Lego, Jenga, Duplo, tape and some sticking plasters to cover the cracks.
Rebuilding GO will address these issues as well as, more importantly, make the platform quicker to load, easier to update, more consistent and mobile friendly. We also hope that by documenting GO’s code patterns and components, we will encourage our national society web developer teams to contribute directly to our open-source GitHub repo.
You can track how this is going through the live staging site established without any live data link here. We aim to have this built by the end of September, in time for the fifth anniversary of the launch of the platform — more details on how we plan to celebrate this milestone soon.
Talking points from the GO Advisory Groups — Secretariat and Membership
As mentioned in the previous briefing, we have formed two new GO Advisory Groups, providing a forum for the Secretariat and Membership to contribute to, learn more about, and influence the direction of the platform.
This time, the GO Secretariat Advisory Group (GO-SAG) focussed on IFRC’s data governance. The GO team explained the data architecture of the site, and how it connects to systems managed by teams across the Secretariat. We discussed how GO’s data structure enables interoperability and a ‘common data model’ for geographic, disaster, and operational data. We also discussed how GO could provide a mechanism for more comprehensively surfacing programmatic data, and agreed to focus on this during the coming months.
The GO Membership Advisory Group (GO-MAG), made up of national Red Cross Red Crescent societies who had been selected to represent their use of GO on previous quarterly briefings, focussed on the country page implementation and implications for NS ownership and maintenance, discussed below.
Representation at the GO-MAG reiterated the need to engage more GO ‘champions’ from the membership. Indeed, we are still interested for other national societies to be represented, please get in touch to get involved — im@ifrc.org
Country pages — tell us what you think!
Last year’s GO Study helped to focus our minds on the potential for GO to become a crossroads for those looking for country-level information from the IFRC network. These pages are set to be primarily driven by data from the host National Society and its partners, but also aim to surface relevant insights into the country’s risks, seasonal calendar and historical crisis data.
Over the past months, we have embarked on a user-centred design process, involving a number of interviews and workshops with people across the network, leading to wireframe designs which we encourage you to review and comment on here — link open until Friday 18th August 2023.
Looking ahead
We have a number of exciting new developments on the platform, planned for release within the next months.
We have nearly completed the extensive revamp of NS preparedness for effective response data collection, management and analysis. GO aims to provide our membership a space to securely store data on their processes, compare their performance over time and through the various stages in the PER cycle, follow-up on their work-plan and connect their preparedness data to other response data in GO. We expect to launch this new feature in the next quarter.
Finally, we provided a brief overview of the 2023 GO workplan, which provides details of deliverables we have committed to this year. Please get in touch if you are keen to contribute or collaborate on any of these features.
90% of GO development is funded directly by our National Societies, and we depend on their continued support to deliver on these plans. If you would like to hear more about our work, or offer financial or material support, please contact im@ifrc.org
